At one in the morning, I stood outside a funeral home on my electric scooter, holding a box of braised chicken and rice.
A new order popped up on my phone: Deliver to “Nonexistent Building 7, Room 701.” The note read: “Less chili, extra scallions, and don't let the dead see you.”
??? Who placed this order? Do people at funeral homes eat braised chicken?
One bad review dragged me into a deadly game. The rules said I couldn't look back, cook in the morgue, or eat anything. But I discovered that if I made an NPC the home-cooked dish they craved most, a crack would appear in the rules.
The price was that after each dish, I randomly inherited one of the customer's emotions. For example, after cooking sweet-and-sour ribs for an enemy, I inexplicably felt like crying for ten minutes.
The hardest thing to deal with in the game wasn't the Boss. It was that aloof man who always wrote “less chili, extra scallions, deboned chicken” in his delivery notes. His combat power was maxed out, his tongue was sharper than mine, and I somehow “just happened” to run into him in every game.
Only later did I learn that every dish the NPCs wanted to eat was a fragment of his memories.
